Jazzing up their shelves ahead of Easter weekend, Tauranga City Libraries ‘won' April Fools' Day with a bluesy message on their Facebook page.

The social media post read 'When customers come in to enquire about a title, often the only piece of information they can give us to identify it is its colour”.

The post went on to say that after a lot of thought and vigorous discussion amongst library staff, they were pleased to announce that from that day, Thursda,y April 1, all titles in their libraries will be shelved by colour rather than in accordance to the rather-outdated Dewey Decimal System.

The Dewey Decimal was invented in 1876, which library staff pointed out was long before colour printing had become wide-spread.

'Although we believe this change will streamline our services, and make shelving a whole lot easier for staff, there is one small concession that we have had to make in order to implement these changes,” says the Tauranga City Library staff on the Facebook page.

'Unfortunately, any multi-coloured titles that cannot be determined to have an NDC, or noticeable dominant colour, - estimated to be approximately 27 per cent of our collection - will be disposed of.

'We hope that you'll agree that this is a small cost on our journey to making the library easier to use and, as a bonus, much prettier.”

The message was published to The Tauranga City Libraries Facebook page at 6.05am on April 1, along with a photo showing a collection of books with blue covers all filed together on the same shelves.

In the background of the photo was a person, with a slightly cheeky smile, in a blue check shirt and blue jeans reading a blue book.

Readers of the post quickly responded.

'Can I get a green book on blue cheese that I read last week?” asks Andrew McKeown.

Cathy Schloemer, while realising it was a joke, wrote: 'Having worked in a library children's room, this is something we should have thought of years ago…people really do ask those kinds of questions about wanting a book they read and all they remember is the colour of the book cover.”

Previous Tauranga Mayor Greg Brownless joined in with the fun writing 'Does this mean the historical newspaper section will be black and white and read (red) all over?”

Craig Jamieson pointed out that 'there may need to be a lot more shelves. There are after all, 50 shades of grey”.

Stewart Wartiehog Andrews queried whether 50 Shades of Grey would qualify as a work of blue fiction.

Others were worried about those who are colour blind being discriminated against, and some thought there could be shelves with a rainbow coloured range of books available, whilst others expressed concern at the NDC books in the Tauranga City Library collection being discarded.

Johanna Hearn wrote 'I agree in principle but disposing of a book as its cover doesn't have a solid colour doesn't seem right at all. Give them their own section. 27 per cent is a lot to get rid of”.

Others also chimed in about the high disposal percentage, concerned that it would mean that all of the Harry Potter books would be thrown out.

After initially joking that the Harry Potter movies 'do sort of render the books obsolete at this point anyway”, Tauranga City Libraries staff quickly reassured the worried Harry Potter fans with a further post saying 'we love books and would never do this for real. Happy April Fools!”